


Split-Second

by CC_Writes_Stuff



Series: Make It Hurt: Whumptober 2020 [30]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Gen, Mentioned Blue Lions Students (Fire Emblem), Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Serious Injuries, Stabbing, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:33:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27102763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CC_Writes_Stuff/pseuds/CC_Writes_Stuff
Summary: Grondor, the second time. A second of distraction leads to a serious injury for Byleth-Written for Whumptober Day 30: Internal Organ Injury
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth & Claude von Riegan, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: Make It Hurt: Whumptober 2020 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915390
Comments: 1
Kudos: 46
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Split-Second

To think, five years ago, this was but a mere mock battle.

It didn’t seem that way now, not to Byleth. The swords and axes and lances and gauntlets they were fighting with were no longer made of wood, their attacks meant to bruise, not maim or kill. The competition was just that - competition, friendly, something for the students to laugh about in the future, to pride themselves on a job well done. There was no violence to it, no risk of death.

No blood staining the ground red, no cries of agony and pain and war calling through the air, no wyverns and pegasi falling from the sky. No mad Dimitri, tearing through anyone not dressed in blue, single eye blazing with the flames of hatred and revenge as Arheadbar rips a bloody path through their foes, the rest of the Blue Lions soldiers - soldiers, not students - follow behind, trying to keep the prince alive.

The Empire holds the northeast flank, along with the hill, armed with a deadly ballista and Demonic Beasts, if Ingrid, Petra’s and Ashe’s reports are right. Edelgard is up there, somewhere, waiting for an outcome. Meanwhile, the Alliance holds the eastern flank, stretching from the top corner, at the touch of the forest, with soldiers lined all the way down until they reach the river the Lions are trapped behind.

Just like how it was five years ago. It brings a bitter taste to Byleth’s mouth.

But there is no time to reminisce. Dimitri is already charging down the middle, roaring like a beast, Flayn and Felix and Ingrid following close behind. Any sense of rationality the mad prince may have had was lost when he heard Edelgard was on the fighting lines, and it seems like he was willing to go through anyone, Alliance or Empire, to get to her.

She followed, close behind. Back him up. Hopefully, despite Dimitri’s demeanor, Claude - she could see him astride a wyvern in the distance - was more willing to cooperate, and fight with the Kingdom troops. Edelgard is their common enemy, after all.

No luck. Byleth isn’t able to tell who started shooting at who, only that the three armies were tearing and heading towards the hill, hoping to gain the ballista, and the advantage.

Byleth keeps half of her team on the left flank, and the other half on the right as she follows Dimitri. Felix is still with her, matching pace for pace as they cut down enemies, Felix cursing Dimitri all the while.

“The boar is so far gone, he can’t even see the advantage to working with the Alliance,” she hears Felix mutter, slashing a deadly strike across an Empire mage’s chest. She screams, a burst of Thoron going haywire and up into the air, falling to the ground.

Byleth’s gaze moves eastwards, to where the Alliance is at. She’s heard that Claude was the leader, now, so maybe… maybe if she can find him, she can convince him to focus on Edelgard.

Another roar, however, cuts her out of her thoughts, and Byleth turns to see an Alliance assassin getting impaled by Dimitri’s lance. He falls to the ground, gurgling, and Dimitri is staring at her intently, burning with a blue flame. Byleth shivers.

“Watch your back, Professor,” he says gruffly as he walks over and snatches up the javelin. Arheadbar is in his other hand, tip so red with blood Byleth can barely make out the orange glow of it. “The enemy will not show mercy, and neither should we. Not until that wrench is dead.”

All Byleth can do is watch as the husk of the prince she once knew walks off, battle-weary and crazed. Too damaged to live, but too stubborn to die. She’s not sure which one would be better - Dimitri, alive but not, a shell of his former self, or Dimitri, dead, grave peaceful like her father’s, a merciful death.

Bitterness curls in her chest again.

However, mercenaries don’t focus on the past. And no matter how hard and how far back she pulls the strings of time, she cannot go back to that battle, to the fall of the monastery, of her. All she can do is move forward, and hope, somehow, Dimitri finds his way back to the light.

That - all of this - will end with Edelgard’s death. A death that’s easier to achieve with unified forces. So, she turns to Felix.

“You stay with Dimitri, keep him out of trouble,” She says in her most stern teacher voice. “I’m going to see if I can’t make a deal with Claude.”

Felix raises a brow, but nods, and follows Dimitri as they charge towards the Empire front lines, half of the Lions following them. Byleth, at least, is thankful for that - it wouldn’t do to try and make peace with Claude when Dimitri is hellbent on killing anyone not adorned in blue.

Still, Byleth is unsure of how to actually approach Claude, not without cutting down a lot of Alliance soldiers on her way. Her best bet is that he spots her, and comes over - hopefully not trigger-happy.

So, in a hope he’ll spot her, Byleth changes course and heads towards the hill, despite, cutting down any soldiers that get in her way, regardless of the color they wear. The Alliance and Kingdom clash halfway through, and Byleth curses. New voices blend over the old, the memories of now and then blurring in her vision.

The hill is already erupting in battle between Alliance and Empire troops, the soldier manning the ballista switching between firing up at the sky and attacking anyone not in red that comes near. Byleth goes for him, first, before he can knock Ingrid and Ashe down from the sky. He attempts to shoot her with his own bow, but Byleth is faster, a hand outstretched as she casts a nosferatu at him. The empire soldier stumbles back, and Byleth takes her chance, running him through with her sword.

The Sword of the Creator pulses in her hands, warm and alive. The weight of it is long familiar in her hands, but not the feel of it. The warmth that normal swords don’t have, even when covered in blood.

Swords clash against swords, lance against shield, ax against gauntlets, arrows against scales, clanging in the air. Shouts and screams roar around her, drowned out by the roar of the mad prince and the Demonic Beasts on the western flank. And despite the brutalness of it, the black-and-white, and shades of grey contrast to the fight from five years ago, Byleth feels alive. Blood pounds in her ears, thrumming along her veins, and her chest and her sword seem to hum with the energy.

This, right here, is what Byleth was meant for, the very essence of her being, her lifestyle before Garreg Mach changed everything. Being in the thick of battle, fighting for her life, not tutoring students in the art of not dying or impulse control for a mad prince or keeping the Lions from breaking apart at the seams. Steel against steel. Will against will. Soldier against soldier. It’s a way she hasn’t felt since she first came to Garreg Mach, but it soars through her as she puts her all into the battle, swinging with conviction.

She uses Divine Pulse once, twice, three, more times. Blood starts to form in her mouth, a taste of metal.

Then, as she’s locked in combat with a cavalier, Edelgard says something over the din of steel against steel. It’s too loud and Byleth is too far away to determine what-

-and she’s not given time to, either. The hill explodes beneath her.

It starts with a loud boom that rocks the earth, sending Byleth off-kilter and onto the ground, and her ears ringing. She blinks, and suddenly, fire is spreading all over the hill.

“What the hell is that?” She hears an Alliance soldier cry out.

 _“Everybody off!”_ Byleth shouts when she spots blue-clad soldiers running up to give her support. She scrambles to her feet as well, intending to join them as the wood around them erupts into flames, intending to get the hell out of here and meet up with the Lions, the truces, and Claude be damned.

But the fire had distracted her, because when she looked to the side next, she sees the cavalier charging at her, too fast for her to properly defend against. Byleth barely has time to take a step back, slashing out with the Sword of the Creator as it hums in her hand. The sword uncoils from itself into the whip form, extending out as the world slows down, and Byleth knows she won’t be fast enough to kill him.

The lance goes through her gut in the same moment the Sword slices through the throat of the cavalier.

The pain is instant, sudden, and immense, burning through her body and spreading outwards, to the tips of her fingers and toes. Byleth can feel the scream that’s ripped from her throat at the pain, tearing at her vocal cords as she stumbles back, thrown off-balance by the force of the attack. The horse neighs and rears up on its hind legs, the dying rider slipping off the saddle and into a limp pile of blood below her, on top of a fallen Alliance soldier.

Byleth falls, too, flat on her ass, vision swimming as the taste of metal in her mouth grows. Her sword falls from her hand, on the ground. Blood, warm and wet and sticky, starts to soak onto it, through her clothes, and onto her hands. Under the immense buzz and tear in her gut, she can feel the heat of the flames surrounding her, hear the shouting of panicked soldiers trying to get away from the hill. Smoke settles around them, covering the world in ash and black fog.

Her pulse trips in her throat, and her gaze focuses on the lance. Still in her gut - probably a good thing. It wouldn’t do for her to-

Nausea rolls over her, and Byleth gags, leaning forward, but it makes the wound ache and she drops so her back is on the ground, choking in smoke and blood and pain. She tastes blood in her mouth, and it drips out from her mouth onto her lips, dribbling down onto her chin. Smoke prickles at her eyes, sharp and burning.

“Mercedes!” Byleth screeches at the top of her lungs, vocal cords protesting the scream, hoping the healer can hear her. The central hill is almost completely vacated now, Byleth being the only living person left, as far as she knows.

There’s no response, just the crackle of flames and the dull roar of battle. Byleth tries again, growing frantic.

“Mercedes! Flayn! Ashe! Ingrid! _Anyone?!”_ She shouts to the sky, hoping someone could hear her, could get her out there. The flames, as far as she can see with rapidly darkening vision, are almost surrounding the entirety of the hill. Byleth can taste them, putrid and foul on her tongue. She can taste the heat - you aren’t supposed to taste heat, right?

A part of Byleth, already succumbing to the blood loss and the heat, wonders if this was how it felt when Jeralt died. The immense pain that comes from nowhere and everywhere, marking itself along her body, the want to do something, but it physically hurts to do so, the slow and shockingly quick realization that you’re going to die.

_Divine Pulse, Byleth, Divine Pulse! Do not be a fool and die here!_

Sometimes, Byleth wondered if it was her own mind that conjured up Sothis’ words since she woke up in the river, or herself.

But she didn’t have time to look at that right now; she can do that when she’s not dying. So, instead, she reaches out to grasp the threads of Divine Pulse, trying to rewind to before the hill explodes and the fire starts. Like water or sand, though, it slips through her grasp, the world slowing for a moment before nausea slammed Byleth in the gut. Time shatters under her hand, rushing back into place, the heat and sting of smoke assaulting her senses.

No. _No_. Byleth refuses to fall here, burning to death on a hill in the middle of nowhere. She would not leave the Lions to fight this war by themselves, leave Dimitri again like she did the first time around. She couldn’t die here, and leave him alone, leave him with another death on his consciousness. It would be the thing that truly drives him over the edge, to kill until he died, by either Edelgard’s hand or someone else’s.

Byleth is the Ashen Demon, and she will not fall here.

Gritting her teeth, Byleth pushed past the pain and nausea swirling around in her gut. She flounders around for the Sword of the Creator.

Cold fingers wrap around a burning hilt, tight until knuckles are white. Byleth lifts it up, digging it into the ground in front of her, squeezing her eyes shut, and forcing herself to her feet. Her side screams in protest, vision swimming and scratchy with tears and smoke, and she tilts to the side. She can taste blood and ash in her mouth, a foul combination that makes her stomach lurch. But she tightens her grips and plants a stance, leaning all her weight on the sword. The heat laps at her skin, hungry, much like it did at Aliell, and she’s reminded of the night she first got her nickname.

It was bandits they were fighting, in a village in the outer reaches of the Kingdom border, near Adrestia. One of them had set the town on fire, sending the village into chaos. She was trapped in one of the houses, protecting an eight-year-old daughter from three of them. She had killed all three, then jumped out of the second-floor window with the child tucked under her arm, covered in blood, and a burn scar stretching the length of her back. Even now, she could still feel the heat liking against her skin, branding her the way Sitri's memory had done to her father, and the shards of glass that had lodged themselves in her shoulder from the window.

That night, despite her injuries, she had gotten up and gotten out with three more kills under her belt and a new scar to share stories about. Not that she’d ever think she’d share stories about them to anyone outside the troop, until she had met the Lions.

But this time, just pushing herself hurts too much, her vision swimming, quickly fading out of her hands, and she had fallen over - when had she fallen over? It’s hard to tell. Everything is too much, too much, much like in those transcendental moments where she had merged with Sothis, feeling everything and nothing around her.

This time, though, all she can feel is pain. Old wounds and new ones alike - the lance that still sits halfway out her gut, the burn mark that stretches along her back, the black, poisonous lines from where she’d been caught in Solon’s trap.

It roars in her ears, her veins, her being, so loud she doesn’t hear the person above shouting her name, the heavy wingbeat of a wyvern, and footsteps running towards her. It takes her a long few moments to realize she’s being lifted up by someone, the world swimming around in her while she’s wrapped in cotton.

Well, it doesn’t seem like cotton, but it’s definitely warm.

“-ch… Tea..!”

 _Oh._ Someone is speaking to her, Byleth realizes belatedly. Whoever it is also put something thin and smooth over her mouth, which helps with the smoke, but not a lot.

“-ach! O... yo... eyes!”

Somehow, despite the smoke that burns in her vision, Byleth heads the command. Her vision is watery, blurry, and black, but she thinks she can make out the outline of a face looking down at her. Her arms and legs are bouncing - she’s being carried.

“Tea.. Can… ou… er me?”

Tea… why are they calling her tea? Her name is Byleth.

No, wait… Tea… ach… teaach… teach. _Teach_. Who was it that called her Teach again?

Byleth frowns up at the face, willing her vision to make it clear as she tries to recall who it was that called her that. But the pieces are still fuzzy - she can make out dark skin, brown hair… a beard? And something green.

Green eyes. Dark skin. Calls her Teach. It takes Byleth a long minute to put the pieces together. By then, the scene around her has shifted, and she can feel something under her butt, arms wrapping around her waist, mindful of the lance still sticking out from her gut, and she’s leaning back on something strong.

“Claude?” Her voice is raspy from the smoke, and it hurts to speak, and when the smoke and ash settle into her mouth she coughs, violently. Smoke is replaced by metal, and something wet drips down her mouth. Byleth isn’t even sure if he heard her.

But, apparently, he does, and speaks again, voice still fading. “Yeah… me, Tea… gett… ou to… aler…”

The world grows dark.

**Author's Note:**

> [I Have a Tumblr!](https://ccwritesstuff.tumblr.com/)


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